Dallas Conwyn's life felt like a bad joke.

First, she flew out to a sorry excuse for a town in Alaska literally called Dead Horse on a business trip. It wasn't even her business trip, it was her dad's, but he wasn't going to be there for three more days because he had gotten an offer to speak at a conference in Boston. Then, right before he was supposed to fly in from Anchorage, the airstrip had been buried under five feet of water by a sudden squall. Alaska was supposed to be cold and snowy, not blistering hot and full of mosquitoes breeding everywhere. Business trips were supposed to involve nice hotels, but the nicest hotel in this town was a two-story building painted a gross shade of yellow. Running water was optional, and the only way to get food was at a poorly-stocked general store. And she was running out of concealer.

So she ran around town for three hours trying to get any kind of cell service, almost stumbling into several restricted areas and getting yelled at by plenty of burly oil rig workers who told her she was in the wrong place, and all she could think was, "yeah, duh, of course I'm in the wrong place, I should be at home in the Florida Keys." She thought about telling them that her dad literally paid their checks, but she figured that wouldn't help much. And when she finally got her phone working, on top of a marshy hill overlooking the flooded airport, the cloud of bugs was so thick she could have cut it with a knife.

She was relieved to see no less than sixty-three missed notifications, mostly calls from her dad's various assistants checking if she was okay and brainstorming various ways to get her out of this town. (Rental cars: none available. Truckers: kept claiming all the room in their trucks was taken up by silly unimportant things like food and clothing. Ubers: for some reason, no drivers wanted to service the top of Alaska.)

She texted her dad the whole list of complaints, but it wouldn't send a message that long, so she had to settle for "I'm ok."

Twenty minutes later, she got another message from his assistant Laura: a list of instructions. They had managed to get her a private shuttle that would be leaving from the hotel the next morning. Until it arrived, she was not supposed to touch anything or go anywhere. So that was exactly what she did for another twenty-two hours, and now she was standing in the cracked parking lot in front of the hotel, holding a huge purple suitcase and wearing her chic-est sweatpants for maximum comfort, witnessing this shuttle for the first time. She had expected something like the usual rental shuttle: a sleek white van, so shiny she could check her makeup in it, maybe with built-in drink service (non-alcoholic, of course--her birthday wasn't for another three months). The vehicle sputtering to a stop in front of her was a pickup truck the same yellow as the hotel walls, covered with water and salt damage. A few boxes and empty oil drums rattled around in the back.

The window rolled down with a terrible screech, and some surprisingly young guy wearing a wool hat poked his head out. "Conwyn?" he asked.

Well, darn. She had been hoping this wasn't the right vehicle. She held up a hand and waved, smiling brightly to mask the absolute disgust she felt. The guy jumped out of the truck and grabbed her suitcase before she could do anything else, tossing it into the back with a thud. If there had been anything in there more breakable than clothes, it would absolutely have broken by now.

"Dallas?" he said. "Is that your name? Cause at first I was worried that was where I had to drive you to."

"Yeah," she answered self-consciously.

"I'm Tate." He held out his hand, and she reluctantly shook it, noting how firm the grip was. He smelled like coffee, mud, and way too much sweat. "It's ten hours to Fairbanks, then seven more to Anchorage. It doesn't get dark at night, but I'd rather get there early to avoid the polar bears, so we should go."

She got in the truck, wrinkling her nose at the strong smell of dust on the dash. "Are there really polar bears here?"

"Oh, yeah. They get right up in the middle of the road sometimes and sniff the trucks. Bullets don't do anything to their big fat skins, just make them mad. You really have to hope they don't get mad at you."

The first twenty minutes of the drive passed in awkward, excruciating silence, Dallas squished up in the passenger's seat, sat at the very tip as to not dirty her sweatpants with oil and God knows what else was caked into the cracked leather. Eventually, Tate grunted and waved his hand vagely in the direction of the glovebox.

"Water's in there. Gum, too."

Dallas eyed the glovebox with suspicion, half-expecting a cloud of dust to explode in her face. Instead, she found an unbranded pack of gum, and several unmarked water bottles that had seen better days. She selected a water bottle carefully and opened it, taking a cautious sniff before drinking. It smelled fine, at least. She drank almost half of it in one go, suddenly realizing how parched her throat was.

"So," Tate said, eyes fixed on the road stretching endlessly ahead of them, "your dad really runs half the operations out here, huh?"

"He owns quite a bit, yes," Dallas said carefully, unsure why she felt the need to downplay it. "But I don't really work in the business. I'm more of a... consultant on aesthetic matters." This sounded better than saying she mostly hung around Miami drinking overpriced smoothies and taking photos for social media.

Tate let out a laugh that turned into a cough. "Aesthetic matters. That why you're wearing designer sweatpants on a trip to Anchorage?"

Dallas bristled. "They're comfortable."

"Didn't say they weren't." He shifted gears as they approached a bend in the road. The landscape here was vast and flat in some places, with mountains rising up unexpectedly in others. Everything was green, which surprised her. She'd expected more snow, despite the current weather. "Your dad ever actually come out here? To Dead Horse?"

"He's supposed to be here for a meeting tomorrow," Dallas said, then corrected herself. "His flight got delayed."

"Yeah, the flooding took out a lot of infrastructure. Those squalls come out of nowhere sometimes." He cracked the window open, and fresh air rushed in, scented gently with the stink of oil.

Dallas turned to look at him. He was concentrating on the road, his jaw slightly clenched. Up close, she could see he was probably only a few years older than her, maybe late twenties. His wool hat was pulled down over dark hair, and he had the kind of tan that came from actually working outdoors, not from sitting by a pool.

He glanced over at her with the hint of a smile. "You're not really equipped for this place, are you?"

"I'm managing fine," Dallas lied.

"You've been checking your phone every thirty seconds for the past fifteen minutes."

She had been. Dallas shoved it back in her pocket, her cheeks burning slightly. "Is there a problem with that?"

"You're not used to being somewhere you can't get a signal everywhere." He reached over and turned on the radio, which crackled to life playing something country that Dallas didn't recognize. "Out here, you either get used to being unreachable, or you go crazy."

"And which are you?" Dallas asked before she could stop herself.

Tate was quiet for a moment. "Got used to it," he finally said. "Helped that I never had much to get calls about anyway."

There was something in the way he said it that made Dallas decide not to press further. Instead, she turned her attention to the window, watching the Alaskan landscape roll past. Despite everything, despite the dust and the smell and the looming threat of unseen polar bears, there was something almost beautiful about it. Vast and lonely and completely indifferent to whether she was there or not.

She grabbed another piece of gum from the glovebox.